Neil Goodman is an American sculptor and educator, known for bronze works that combine elegant arrangements and forms with hand-wrought, textured surfaces.
12 Facts About Neil Goodman
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Neil Goodman has been awarded public commissions for Chicago's McCormick Place, the Block Museum of Art, Indiana University Northwest, and cities in Connecticut, Indiana and Michigan.
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Neil Goodman was born in 1953 in Hammond, Indiana, a steel-mill city outside of Chicago, whose industrial rust-belt landscape remains a key influence.
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Neil Goodman secured a teaching position at Indiana University Northwest in Gary in 1979 as a founding member of the Fine Arts department.
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Since 2017, Neil Goodman has been an Emeritus Professor of Fine Arts at IUN, after nearly four decades there teaching and serving as department chair.
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Neil Goodman's career is noted for its consistent modernist formal vocabulary, which has evolved through nuanced but significant experimentation from representation and narrative toward abstraction and minimalism; he cites Giacometti and Brancusi as important touchstones.
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Neil Goodman's imposing, freestanding "Cage" works have been likened to open-backed reliefs resembling altarpieces, which use thin, vertical architectonic frameworks to define and section interior spaces into platforms and compartments for the display of abstract and representational forms.
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In 1997, Neil Goodman created Passage for Chicago's McCormick Place South Pavilion, a 90' x 15' permanent wall installation that features an "alphabet" of more than 130 forms, many nautical, reflecting its lakeside locale; a triangular-shaped, stairwell wall-piece, Subject-Object, resides in the Block Museum of Art in Evanston, Illinois.
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In 2010, Neil Goodman installed five "Shadows and Echoes" works cast in fiberglass in an outdoor exhibition at the Nathan Manilow Sculpture Park in University Park, Illinois.
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Neil Goodman's subjects have included the Confederate Mound at Chicago's Oak Woods Cemetery, artists including John Henry, Richard Hunt, Martin Puryear, Rembrandt, Richard Rezac, Richard Serra, Peter Shelton, Adam Silverman and Kehinde Wiley, and a memorial to the late Chicago art dealer, Paul Klein.
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Neil Goodman wrote the introductory essay for the book, Contemporary Sculptors of Chicago, and an essay for the catalog Night and Day, for his commission at Valparaiso University.
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Neil Goodman's work belongs to the public art collections of the Brauer Museum of Art, Illinois State Museum, Indiana State Museum, Madden Museum of Art, Museum of Outdoor Arts, Nathan Manilow Sculpture Park, Racine Art Museum and Rockford Museum of Art, as well as many corporate and private collections.